Now 1 having proved such a success, it was decided to repeat the exercise swiftly. But Now II
– we won’t be getting back to those Roman numerals until entry #376 –
is not really the same sort of package as its predecessor. This was the
first in the series to be compiled by Ashley Abram, who you may remember
was hired over from Ronco following the good work he did in putting
together Raiders Of The Pop Charts – and although the
final assortment of songs is not quite satisfactory, and their
sequencing in places somewhat clumsy, there returns the feeling that,
somewhere in its television-advertised depths, there lies an effort to
tell a story.

It
is not quite the same story that would have been told if other
significant hits from January and February 1984 (plus a few stragglers
from late 1983) had been included; “The Killing Moon,” “Holiday” and
“Let The Music Play” (the latter only available on this album’s
accompanying videocassette) might have led the story in a different and
possibly opposing direction, not to mention the ramifications of “Nobody
Told Me” taking on “Pipes Of Peace.” I once again note that CBS, and
WEA, continue to hold some key cards to their chests.

But
I also note that twenty-six of the thirty songs included on this album
are by British, or British-based, artists (including multinational acts
like the Thompson Twins, Matt Bianco and Hot Chocolate) with just four
non-British acts – three American, one German – all of whom appear on
side two. Many notable names, as I said when I wrote about Now 1, make their series debut here, as though cautiously holding back to see how the first collection did before jumping in.

I
think it most significant, however, that the album begins and ends with
statements from artists who predated the eighties, both of whom are
saying, in their own ways, “don’t let it die” – we love the radio, don’t
kill it, before the record gradually raises the stakes and we are left
with: we love humanity, don’t destroy it. It is as if one last desperate
message in a bottle is being smuggled out (it is a true pity that ABC’s
“S.O.S.,” which just squeezed into the Top 40 during the period
covered, wasn’t a bigger hit and included here) to say: you know, this
thing we all say we love – it might be in the process of dying, becoming
extinct. There is a lot of angst at work here – the “Us” versus “Them”
polemic hinted at throughout entry #297 becomes more apparent - and
enough thought was given to the programming to ensure that each of the
four sides concludes with a relatively downbeat elegy. Do you, the
question appeared to be directed to the record’s listeners, really want
to see it all go?

Queen

The
song was originally entitled “Radio Ca Ca” in honour of a remark Roger
Taylor’s son made while listening to a not very good record on the radio
in Los Angeles (Taylor discreetly does not say which record it was). In
other words, “Radio Shit.” But this mutated, as things often do, to its
better-known title, one strong enough to inspire the stage name of an
Italian-American performer who at this stage will not yet be born for
almost two years; and it is a pretty heavy burden of irony that the song
carries – a response, or companion, to “Video Killed The Radio Star,”
it is a plea for music and radio not to be swept away by pointless
videos, issued under the name of the act who, more than anybody else,
had set the ball rolling for the music video to conquer “music” and
indeed “radio” some eight-and-a-half years previously.

For a supposedly futuristic record, everything about “Radio Ga Ga” looks backwards – to the twenties for the Metropolis-inspired
video (which, with its river of uniformly raised hands, became an MTV
staple), to the thirties and forties for its lyric, with its mentions of
the Mercury Theater’s War Of The Worlds and
paraphrasing of Churchill’s “finest hour,” even to earlier in the
eighties – 1981 in particular; the hiccupping Roland Jupiter-8/drum
machine pattern which burps into action in the gaps between chorus and
verse is highly reminiscent of “White Car In Germany” by the Associates,
while the vocoder recalls “O Superman” rather more readily than it does
Sparky’s Magic Piano.

Another
irony lay in the fact that Radio 1 adored the record; kept at number
two behind the banned “Relax,” the station treated it as though it were
the actual number one (an irony which certainly wouldn’t have been lost
on Freddie Mercury, who I’d wager absolutely adored “Relax”). And yet,
despite all of this, the song is a strangely moving one; the
electro-leanings which had made themselves apparent during Hot Space were now fully formed, and Mercury sings with
the song rather than soaring over its crossbar. The bridge’s whole-tone
modulations lend an air of the world closing down, and of a glittery
goodbye to it – May’s distant guitar, still crying (or sleepwalking) for
Hank Marvin, is probably his least typical playing on any Queen record –
and in some ways, “Radio Ga Ga” plays like the last record you’d ever
hear on any radio; bear in mind that it is 1984, and that the world
could still end at any second.

Nik Kershaw

If
there’s a tendency in 1984 British pop, it’s for people who are unhappy
with who they are. Consider Nik Kershaw; but maybe it’s because he’s a
guitarist – indeed, he was once more or less regarded as Colchester’s
own John McLaughlin (see Giles Smith’s Lost In Music for
further confirmation) – and has a more inventive understanding of
harmonics, but his doe-eyed snood-dominant uncertainty is so evidently
superior to other contemporaries who are routinely bracketed with him.
“Wouldn’t It Be Good,” not his first single but his first major hit,
never quite prevents itself from being threatening (“I’d stay right
there if I were you”), and the singalong chorus yearns for oblivion
(“Wouldn’t it be good if we could wish ourselves away?”). He has an
excellent understanding of the dynamics of a pop record, too – in
conjunction with producer Peter Collins, making the first of three
appearances on this record – as noted by the harmonic clash set up by
the underlying heartbeat and the triumphant, or wrecked, entry of the
extended guitar/brass unison figure; no wonder Miles, watching him at
Live Aid on TV, dug his “changes” and wanted to make a whole album with
him. “I got it bad,” he reiterates, “You don’t know how bad I got it” –
yet this distress is less egotistical, and therefore more relatable,
than Super Sexy Sting (who in 1985 made a cameo appearance on a Miles
Davis album) being the King of Pain.

Thompson Twins

I
have nothing more to add to what I previously wrote about this song,
but Lena did mention its underlying shuffle and wondered how good an Al
Green cover version would be.

The “Jazz” Revival

Did
it really happen, or was it only ever dreamt in a Wardour Street
doorway? All I remember was that the eighties British “jazz” revival had
very little to do with jazz, and everything to do with clothes, looks
and style. Therefore stalwart improvisers who had been keeping the torch
burning since the sixties, but who were unfortunate enough to come on
stage dressed like electricians, were laughed at, discredited and in
some cases exiled from finding work, while mouthy nonentities had their
bullshit jive magnified in most monthly magazines of the period,
including, I’m afraid to say, The Wire. It was indeed
depressing to observe, month after month, some sharp-suited turkey
blether on about their feeble music and how jazz needed a kick up the
backside and how they were going to deliver it, somebody you knew would
be dropped by a major label after one 200-selling LP which did its best
to sound as little like jazz as possible. Or the late and very great
Graham Collier, writing to City Limits to point out
elementary errors in a piece on jazz that had been published, only to be
sneered at by a hack of no importance, someone who, frankly, wasn’t fit
to micturate on Mr Collier’s shoes (and yes, I remember the names, and
no, I’m not going to print them here).

Anyway,
apart from a few worthy entrants – Sadé most obviously, but also the
early Everything But The Girl, and Working Week (before they, or their
record company, decided to ditch most of the jazz players in the group
and become a boring retro-soul band instead) – it was all, and only,
about style, and bloody Serge Clerc illustrations and I don’t know what
else (the Style Council’s Café Bleu confirms quite
disastrously that jazz isn’t punk; its “jazz” does not swing, the horn
players sound stilted and under-experienced, and the overall impression
is one of closing soundtracks to fifties French beach comedies; live
audiences were instantly baffled). Interestingly, both Matt Bianco and
Carmel were groups which subsequently became far more successful on the
Continent than at home – in France, Carmel remain a name band to this
day – so I presume that the absence of a style-obsessed music press
worked more in their favour.

“Get
Out Of Your Lazy Bed” is like a spiky late sixties French cartoon of
jazz, everything sped up insanely, Basia’s wordless vocals multiplied
into Theresa Bazar chorales (no wonder Trevor Horn loved the record,
another Peter Collins production), supersonic piano triplets and Ronnie
Ross playing the same baritone solo that he had done on “Walk On The
Wild Side.” As the group arose from the ashes of Blue Rondo Á La Turk,
however, you could play a tortoise-and-hare kind of game with them and
Modern Romance.

Carmel
was a trio, singer Carmel McCourt (from Lincoln, but by now based in
Manchester) plus rhythm section, and “More, More, More” is spirited
enough, if somewhat monodimensional; as with “Lazy Bed,” the production
tricks (Mike Thorne, who also produced Soft Cell – how much would this
record have profited from the addition of “Soul Inside”? Or would it
have just put everybody off buying it?) are mainly there to mask the
predominance of a riff, or a hook, over a song as such. McCourt gives it
plenty – in Amy terms, her vocal points more forward to Duffy than it
does to Winehouse – and the horns are given a few things to do, but
there is no real sense of climax or release; it repeats over and over
and fades when it, or the listener, gets bored. As did the “hipsters”
when they moved on to Rare Groove and jazz was left to fend for itself.
As it had been doing anyway.

Madness

One
of two Madness songs on this record, and, as I’m sure Madness are tired
of having people point out, this isn’t a song about Michael Caine (even
though he himself appears, at the behest of his daughter who insisted
that he couldn’t turn Madness down). Its roots were in the torture scene
in The IPCRESS File, where Caine’s Harry Palmer struggles to remain sane by repeating, over and over: “My name is Harry Palmer.”

No,
“Michael Caine,” blessed with divine Robert Wyatt/“Bogus Man”-era Roxy
Music chord changes, is about an IRA informer, someone placed in
compulsory exile, someone who realises that they have no life left, nor
even any real identity (“He can’t remember his own name”). It heralded
an even more sombre (and perhaps madder?) Madness, and it remains a
terrific piece of dark pop, marred only by then-obligatory, NME-pleasing
Soulful, Passionate and Honest backing vocals.

And, like so many things on Then Play Long
over this period – particularly the bass-playing, and its relationship
to drums and harmony – the song would not have sounded out of place in
the mid-nineties repertoire of Blur.

Flying Pickets

Just
as fifteen years previously the Scaffold achieved the Christmas number
one with a rueful novelty of a reminder of the debris which the spirit
of the Beatles had left behind in its predetermined wreckage, a
socialist theatrical troupe ascended to the top over the Christmas of
1983 with a strange postscript to the first wave of New Pop. "Only You"
had been Yazoo's first and biggest hit back in that sacred spring of
1982, proving to those whose minds were sufficiently blunted to request
proof of things clearly evident that "electronics" and "soul" could mix
and live together, a decade after Sly, Stevie, Timmy Thomas et al
had conclusively demonstrated the same premise. And the Flying Pickets -
whose name itself proved achingly appropriate in light of the impending
miners' strike - offer something of a baleful farewell to a closing
era.

The vocal arrangement, which may or may not have been Fairlight-assisted – the group insists that it wasn’t - is
ingenious and lead singer Brian Hibberd's doleful voice works well with
the dissolute, abandoned lyric ("Wonder if you understand/It's just the
touch of your hand/Behind the closed door") even if he can't bend his
voice in the same confidential/despairing way as Moyet's. No doubt due
to producer John Sherry, all the harmony vocals sound as though fed
through a shredder, such as Hibberd at times sounds as though stranded
in a bleak hall of mirrors. It stands as a requiem for something bigger
than pop; the group’s very name is one of the few explicit references on
this record to the miners’ strike, which was now under way. Their "Only
You" acts as a closing chapter to both 1983 and to the first act of New
Pop - but, as we shall see later on this record, a bloody last-ditch
retaliation was imminent.

Nena

If
any record were to follow the hard act (ouch) that was "Relax" then it
had to be one about nuclear war - well, that one will follow in a little
while, but in the meantime politics are kept to the forefront in the
only single to make the British and American top three by the same
artist in different languages. Americans opted for the original German
"99 Luftballons" whose guttural-verging-on-guttate enthusiasm fits the
tone of the song rather better than the clumsy English adaptation.

"99
Red Balloons" strives to be ambitious; the drifting, out-of-tempo, New
Age synth-dominated intro and outro, then extended interludes of jittery
Euro-electrofunk mutating - and well I remember being irritated by the
little head-down/body-in jog that Nena did on TOTP as
the drums sped up - into Blondie-style Noo Wave with which Nena
valiantly strives to maintain control of breath. Essentially the song is
a slightly implausible metaphor about Nena and her mate buying the
titular balloons out of "a little toy shop/with the money we've got" (it
must have been a fair amount if they could afford 99 balloons) then
"set them free at the break of dawn" (money well spent) on some
unaccountable hippy notion. Naturally the military mistake said clump of
balloons (which miraculously stay together as one unit despite having
been let go "one by one") for a nuclear weapon (it's the easiest of
mistakes to make). Cue Armageddon, as heralded by the unforgettable
"Worry worry super-scurry!/Call the troops out in a hurry!"

At
the end Nena is left standing alone "in this dust that was a city"
except that she adopts an absurd Nashville twang to sing "I'm standin'
pretty" just so that she can have something to rhyme with "city" - but
how has she managed to survive alone, unscathed by bomb blasts or
radiation? Never mind; the metaphor is intact - she finds the one
remaining red balloon (also miraculously untouched) and lets it go (cue
guitar sliding up into the heavens) even though some might point out
that that kind of prank was what caused the problem in the first place.

I'm
doubtless being far too cynical for the song's own good; it was 1984,
the fear of abruptly being incinerated in a nuclear war was, as I have
already said, a real and palpable one, and in the face of transatlantic
Star Wars idiocy (Reagan, not Lucas), "99 Red Balloons" does form a
modest canoe of ideological resistance, even if, like "San Francisco" in
1967, it never actually changed anything. But these were harder times
demanding a harder response - and the one which came that summer perhaps
makes Nena's balloons seem unfeasibly woolly. Still, as an example of
1967 speaking to and scolding the present age, it does foresee, of all
implausible metaphors, CBS labelmate Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song.”

Unshakeable
American Optimism

It cannot be coincidental that the chinks of light on
this album are mainly provided by America; they provide a very useful and
welcome contrast to the encroaching darkness that is otherwise apparent. I also
think it deliberate that Abram followed up “99 Red Balloons” – the world has
ended, how much darker can things get? – with “Girls Just Want To Have Fun”
(not “Wanna” as the sleeve mistakenly has it) wherein Cyndi Lauper, erstwhile
singer with Blue Angel, loved and acknowledged by nobody in Britain save Ray
Lowry at the NME, in 1981 (and when “Girls”
came out here, Lowry was back in the NME
singles column saying, with much justification, nyah nyah I told you so),
thrusts herself to the foreground with goofy bubblegum which doubles up as
proto-girl punk anthem. “Somebody take a beautiful girl,” cries Lauper, “and
hide her away from the rest of the world.” She spits all that boys’ club crap
out and claims the song, originally written in 1979 by a man from a man’s point
of view (one Robert Hazard, who I understand was none too pleased with Lauper’s
modifications), for her own, popcorn synthesiser bleeping a rippling jackpot
behind her. Had it not been up against “Relax” it would have been a more than
worthy number one – and, at the time, the song (and its parent album, She’s So Unusual)
was way ahead of what
Madonna was attempting. Indeed, with its reference to "a walk in the
sun," the song's aspirations unite it to Springsteen's "Born To Run," a
record made available not long before "Bohemian Rhapsody."

“Break My Stride” is really nothing more than a jaunty
and slightly old-fashioned trot through the positivity allotment – rhyming “rocky”
with “cocky” indeed! – but its straight-faced hopefulness is enough here to
postpone apocalypse, at the very least; New Yorker Wilder never had another hit
to match it and moved on to writing and producing for others, the latter most
notably on No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom.
Whereas “Breakin’ Down” is a wonderful early 1984 spring cleaner of a club hit,
organic and enticing, with thrillingly interacting brass and percussion lines
and a bravura vocal from Julia Nixon; enough to make one wish that flesh and
blood were still palpable features of contemporary pop.

Tracey Ullman

If indeed these songs are assembled in a specific order
for a specific reason, then it is logical to assume that at least some of them
interact in some way. Ullman’s Madness cover – she too is singing a man’s song
from a woman’s perspective, but the angle is acutely different – isn’t nearly
well known enough; David Bedford’s strings and brass swoop across the picture
like disappointed vultures. Once again, Peter Collins produced; Mark Bedford of
Madness played bass; Neil Kinnock appeared in the video; and Ullman sounds, of
all people, like a female Robert Wyatt. But this could be the same woman to
whom Tom Bailey is desperately trying to hold on in “Hold Me Now.”

I Like To Watch TV
On My Own Every Now And Then

There was The Boys
From The Blackstuff, and there was Auf
Wiedersehen, Pet, in which the plight of Thatcher’s non-working class was
examined for its comedic potential. It made stars out of Jimmy Nail, Timothy
Spall and Kevin Whately, and via one of its other actors there is even a direct
familial link to entry #990. Unable to find work in Britain, they go to work on
a building site in Dusseldorf, the home of Kraftwerk; cue multiple hilarious
mishaps and state-of-the-nation banter somewhat below the level of the same
writers’ Whatever Happened To The Likely
Lads? a decade earlier. The theme tune, co-written and produced by old hand
David Mackay and performed by the 43-year-old Liverpudlian Joe Fagin, is a
theme tune stretched out with some difficulty to just under three minutes, with
much reference to “the dames,” “the wife” and generally having manly fun. I do
not think the show would be thinkable now.

Ghosts From The
Seventies

Veterans from the days of Disco Fever, “I Gave You My Heart” was Hot Chocolate’s last original
(i.e. not reissued or remixed) hit single. Chart stalwarts since 1970, this
song sounded like their boat was sailing out too far to sea to be rescued and
there is no real reason why it should have made #13, let alone be featured
here; Mickie Most is still producing but both song and performance are so
anaemic that one is tempted to ring for a blood transfusion; 1983’s “Tears On
The Telephone,” a record made under the very considerable influence of ABC,
proved that they still had a few ideas up their sleeve if pushed, but “I Gave
You My Heart” – a song written by Richard Gower, the singer with Racey - really
sounds like they are giving up the ghost; half cod-Motown, half very reluctant
reggae, Errol Brown sounding as though he is struggling to stay awake.

Snowy White

After the gleaming nowness of the American contributions,
it is perhaps significant that the final three songs on side two sound as
though they might as well have come from the 1975 charts; White is probably
best known for his early eighties membership of Thin Lizzy and his long-term
involvement with Pink Floyd, and then Roger Waters, as a backing guitarist. He
sang and played guitar on “Bird Of Paradise,” by some margin his best-known
song, and it sounds melancholy and vaguely hurt, if not philosophical; his
guitar sings what he cannot, and before we know it we are listening to a
memorial for the still living Peter Green.

There has to be more to 1984 pop life, the implication
goes, than this.

The Reaction (I)

“I put on my clothes again, behind the screen. My hands
are shaking. Why am I frightened? I’ve crossed no boundaries, I’ve given no
trust, taken no risk, all is safe. It’s the choice that terrifies me. A way
out, a salvation.”

(Margaret Atwood, The
Handmaid’s Tale, Chapter Eleven)

1. Necessity

In all ways, it had to come. 18 months after New Pop had
peaked, and there was scant evidence of any triumph. The Top 40 had retreated
into what John Peel contemptuously dubbed “a Radio 2 chart” full of soothing
platitudes, safe novelties and the decaying colours and ribbons which was all
New Pop seemed to mean to a lot of people (Peel again, on TOTP, December 1983: “Isn’t it great that Billy Joel has two
singles in the top ten?” he snarled to camera through teeth never more earthily
gritted). Against this, there was the indie tugboat of resistance – New Order,
the Cocteau Twins, the Fall and of course the Smiths – but still there was the
urge for a more pronounced reaction.

2. Newness

It was only too fitting that the eleventh hour cavalry
charge of New Pop – or its last explicit stand – should be led by its principal
sonic architect and chief critical cheerleader. Morley had locked horns with
Horn in the NME back in 1980, at the
time of “Video Killed The Radio Star”; he was none too impressed and deemed
Buggles “the dustbinmen of pop.” But two years later Dollar and ABC had come to
pass, and suddenly the two men, again in the NME, found themselves to be on the same side. With New Pop in
freefall, as fully and carelessly as George Michael’s spilled drink into the
swimming pool in the video for “Club Tropicana,” it was natural that the two
should go into battle.

3. Mercy

Unless you were there and sympathetic at the time, it is
difficult to convey how devastatingly important that first Art Of Noise EP was.
As the autumn of 1983 approached it genuinely did feel that pop music was
finished; all that remained were ageing MoR matinee idols from a spent previous
era, lapsed prog-rockers convincing themselves that they were New Popists, and
the dying embers of the few real New Popists still slugging it out. A letter in
the NME of the period complained that
the Top 40 was “physically painful to listen to” with only three good records
(two of which were by New Order).

So Into Battle With
The Art Of Noise appeared as a modest laser beam of deliverance. Although
the genesis was Horn’s team experimenting with samples and outtakes from the Duck Rock sessions, those Zulu voices
can be heard as far back as the summer of 1982, buried within the glittering
mausoleum of Dollar’s “Videotheque.” And yet the found sounds, somewhere in a
teasing triangle between Morton Subotnick, Raymond Scott and Joe Meek (do you Hear A New World in “Beat Box”?), were
stretchy and playful as pop hadn’t been for some time; the moves were
unpredictable, the tactics (both musically and philosophically) were alluring,
and in “Moments In Love” something considerably more.

4. Advent

At the “climax” of the latter we can hear 16 rpm moans
from a vaguely hoarse voice. That was the slowed-down voice of Holly
Johnson…and Frankie Goes To Hollywood were ZTT’s next move. When the first ZTT
promotional ads appeared in the music press it was impossible not to be
instantly thrilled, not to want to go and investigate all of these promising
new horizons of music and art (even though Propaganda and Anne Pigalle were as
yet unrecorded). Frankie Goes To Hollywood were a curious choice for a launch,
though, I felt at the time; I had heard them in session on Janice Long’s Radio
1 show without paying much attention – sticky-backed Scouse punk-funk not quite
startling enough to emerge out of studium, though it was a reasonably logical,
if not outrageously illogical (which was really what was needed), development from
Johnson’s previous band Big In Japan (which also harboured two further number
one artists of future importance) – and couldn’t quite see what, if anything,
Horn could get out of them. As unpromising a project as taking on a fast-fading
MoR teenpop duo in 1981…

5. Quiet Dawn

“Relax” was released on Hallowe’en 1983; I bought it on
the Wednesday, in both 7” and 12” editions (already I wanted not to miss a
second of this second Futurism of Zang Tuum Tumb). I noted immediately that the
12” had almost nothing to do with the song as it stood on the 7”; instead it
manipulated and modified the underlying rhythm through a fascinating if
marathon thirty-one minutes of stealth funk which could have emerged straight
from Cabaret Voltaire’s 2 x 45 – no
doubt that was the intention. Value for money. The root 7” sounded good too,
colourful and surprising, big without being smugly suffocating – but even then
I knew that whatever real power the record possessed was unlikely to reveal
itself unless or until it became a big hit. Out in the fields of Left it would
become lost.

6. Slow Burn
Necessitating Accelerator

For the first couple of months of its existence, “Relax”
heeded its own advice and took its time selling; it was getting plenty of radio
play and selling solidly and consistently but was feeling its way up the chart
by only one or two places per week. Despite the numerous plaudits Into Battle was likewise proving a
stubborn seller, and there was a very real worry that not only would “Relax” be
swallowed up in the Christmas market but that the entire ZTT project might
capsize as a result.

Some favours were called in, and the band appeared on
Channel 4’s The Tube just before
Christmas in full flourish, complete with girls, bondage and a total absence of
ambiguity about what “when you wanna come” and “when you wanna suck it to it”
might mean. Compared to, say, Paul Young or the Thompson Twins it was
remarkably strong stuff for a teatime audience, but it generated enough
interest in the group and the single – in combination with the traditionally
low level of post-Christmas record sales – to propel “Relax” to number 35 in
the first chart of 1984; into the Top 40 and therefore eligible for the racks
of Woolworths and the studios of TOTP.

7. Cant Come

And then there was the slow realisation and the
less-than-slow reactionism. In those days the Top 40 was issued on Tuesday
lunchtime, and Radio 1, keen to exploit the chart’s centrality to the station’s
existence, ran it thrice; live on the Tuesday lunchtime show, then again on
Tuesday teatime (Peter Powell casting a more critical eye on the list) and
lastly on Mike Read’s breakfast show on Wednesday morning. Despite having
played it regularly and enthusiastically for the best part of two months, while
counting down the Top 40 on the morning of Wednesday 4 January, Read suddenly
experienced a Damascean revelation, realised what “Relax” was actually about
(as though the single cover alone couldn’t have given it away), spluttered some
disgusted outrage and refused to play it. Initially Read went it alone in this
regard, but over the next few days Radio 1 opted to ban it from the station
altogether. However, their TOTP
performance had already been recorded, and it went out on that Thursday’s
programme – there were no girls or bondage, but the impact remained murderously
explosive and revelatory. Whipped up (so to speak) by the inevitable press
brouhaha, “Relax” was suddenly on a roll; in the following week’s chart it had
leapt to number six (I note incidentally that Channel 4 were at the time
running the first properly networked rerun of ThePrisoner on British
television). The next week it was at number two behind “Pipes Of Peace,” and
there was a repeat of the “God Save The Queen” frisson – would The Powers That
Were conspire to keep it off the top? But that was not to be; on the day before
my twentieth birthday “Relax” became an unqualified number one, allegedly
outselling the rest of that week’s Top 20 combined. The silence on the various
Top 40 shows and on TOTP was
deafening and profound.

8. Radio One
Cant…Or Could They?

By the beginning of 1984 Radio 1 were in an embarrassing
position; explicitly set up in 1967 to cater for the teenage fans of the then
newly-outlawed pirate radio, they had now settled into a junior cardigan
version of Radio 2, and their controller of the time, Derek Chinnery, was keen
to push Radio 1 to an even more upmarket – and more middle-aged, and certainly
richer – audience. In an interview conducted with the Slow Dazzle fanzine in 1984, Peel complained bitterly about having
his four weekly evening shows cut to three, and quoted Chinnery as saying that
Peel’s show was fit only for hoodlums and undesirables. It’s a wonder that he
stayed with Radio 1, but he did; meanwhile, as the new wave of pirate radio
began to explode in London, highlighting the soul, rap and electro music which
mainstream radio was still strenuously avoiding – the young Tim Westwood being
among the broadcasters in question – the BBC’s hat continued to look progressively
older and shabbier. In that same interview, Peel also cited Chinnery’s desire
to cater for “young professionals in the car on their way home from the theatre
or to the restaurant who want to listen to something familiar like…Kenny
Rogers.” Thus, to a degree, the preponderance of dreary, nullifying MoR in the
charts of the period. It seemed that everything was being neutralised.

9. Come Cant

Of course the BBC, as we now know, were also hoist by
their own hypocritical petard with the “Relax” debacle. Nearly all of their
daytime DJs indulged in ooh-ing and aah-ing and cor-ing at Page Three models
and nudity and comeliness in general; Steve Wright in particular revelled in
“makes you feel like…making love” sub-Barry Whiteisms when spinning the latest
Lionel Richie or Al Jarreau hot, hip platter for the valium-stricken housewives
who were his core audience. And, as with TheSun, having frothed at the collective
mouth, they then proceeded to mock open mouths of outrage when presented with
the real thing (here I paraphrase what Julie Burchill pointed out in the NME at the time). Their embarrassment
and stupidity were made all the more profound by the fact that commercial radio
gleefully continued to play “Relax” – and that was reflected in their relative
ratings.

10. Real Thing

Because “Relax” was unavoidably and inevitably the Real
Thing; an explicit and gleeful celebration of gay sex. At last, after the
decades of coded messages in “Secret Love” or “Have I The Right?” or “You’ve
Got To Hide Your Love Away,” after an era of New Pop where even Boy George and
Marc Almond were obliged to be all coy and ambiguous about their sexuality,
here it was, out in the open, unashamed and loud, with its hardcore on-the-beat
beat, its pauses and liquid explosions placed for deliberate maximum impact. It
took the emerging hi-NRG boom (taking the recent innovations of Bobby “O” and
others into account) and made it pop, and nearly every important hi-NRG record
to emerge in the Britain of 1984 had to acknowledge either “Relax” and/or “Blue
Monday” (even as the dancefloors of such places as Fire Island in Edinburgh
were already that summer mutating the hi-NRG template in tandem with this
strange new electronic music that was beginning to emerge from Chicago).

11. Glad

Tom Robinson had made the Top 20 in 1978 with “Glad To Be
Gay” but a typically timid EMI hid it away as part of an EP and another track,
the straightforward rocker “Don’t Take No For An Answer,” was promoted to and
played on radio as the assumed lead track. But, as I said, after “Relax” there
could be no more hiding. By the summer of 1984 leading hi-NRG divas such as
Hazell Dean and Evelyn Thomas had crossed over to become chart regulars – and
more vitally, the likes of Bronski Beat (politically) and Divine (hardcore-ly)
were now getting major hits and opening things up in a way that would have been
unthinkable even six months previously.

12. Mess Aesthetics

From its opening Olympian call to arms (in both senses)
via its relentlessly doubling drumming to its crucial final pause before the
two explosions – the first the loudest Horn had ever sounded, and then the
second to soundtrack the actual coming with its quadrupling drumbeat (Holly’s
murmur, Rutherford’s “HEY!” and then BANG!!), closed by Holly’s satisfied,
triumphant, echoing purr of “COME!” “Relax” sounded and still sounds
magnificent and magisterial, especially when you couldn’t hear it on the chart
rundown; excluded perhaps less on account of scandal than for fear of shaming
its (mostly) rightly-humbled contemporaries – its worthiest competitor was the
abovementioned “Girls Just Want To Have Fun,” in its way of cheerful garish
even more subversive than “Relax” (it should be noted that both Cyndi Lauper
and Madonna made their UK chart debuts in the same week of January 1984). It is
clear that Horn pulled out that extra ounce of forthright power with a
purposive view to making “Relax” the unanswerable answer to the New Pop crisis.
This was the record everybody had to beat…including, eventually, Horn and
Frankie themselves…and, as Morley later commented in one of his innumerable
Frankie ad campaigns, they made much of the rest of pop appear small and petty.

13. The Killing Of
Pop

And yet, if “Relax” was the saviour of pop, it also dealt
the notion of the pop single its fatal blow. Rarely satisfied with final mixes,
and taking a direct lead from Brian Wilson in this respect, Horn endlessly
tinkered with the mix of “Relax” so that the standard version, which appears on
this album, is different from that which eventually appeared on Frankie’s own
album is different from the version which appears on the cassette single is
different from the endless remixes which now seeped out from Sarm West Studios.
Above even the controversy, it was the remixes which helped “Relax” towards its
record-breaking unbroken 37-week run on the Top 40 (in the Top 75 it managed
the full 52 weeks of its year, and even then, just like “Blue Monday,” it, as
it would be, came back for more); every time it seemed on the verge of slipping
out of the chart, BANG! would come a new mix, and it would guiltily, or
proudly, slope its way upwards again. This eventually meant that no one has
really been able to agree on the “definitive” version of “Relax” and thus the
abandonment of the concept of the self-contained, three-minute “definitive”
single was set in motion. This had of course been on the cards since “Good
Vibrations” and “Strawberry Fields,” but the advent of the 12-inch single in
the ‘70s had accelerated evolution, and thus did begin to die the need for the
“single” as people had known it. Some were quick to dismiss the quick-change
“Relax” remixes as cynical cashing-in, but in the long term it heralded the
slow passing of something hitherto vital to pop; now everything was in
floatation, amenable to amendments and, ultimately, whatever shape its individual
listeners wanted it to assume. Thus, perhaps, did New Pop go on to win at least
part of the war. How other parts of it were fought – and to what effect – we will
shortly discover.

In
the context of this album, Lena commented approvingly that “Relax” was like
Godzilla trampling over a poor little city (i.e. most of what precedes it on
side two). In a purely metaphorical sense, I can go with that.

Love, Love, Love

Conceptualism
rears its head once again; the first four songs on side three seem placed to
examine love from four different perspectives. In “Here Comes The Rain Again”
Annie Lennox asks that her lover treat her in the manner she expects lovers to
treat their loved; Howard Jones ponders the very nature of love; Frankie say sod
wondering, just DO it; and The Smiths, in their only Now appearance, approach love with a gloomy approximation of
realism.

I
briefly mentioned their eponymous debut album in entry #296, and it would
appear that its failure to top the chart ahead of Into The Gap was in part due to Rough Trade not printing the
cassette editions of the album in time; remember, the vast majority of Into The Gap’s UK sales were on cassette.
Morrissey fulminates against this, as he does against many other things and
people, in his Autobiography, in
which he also expresses his extreme disappointment with the album as John Porter
produced it. He thinks that Porter smoothed the band’s sound down such that he
made them sound dull and bland, their formerly exciting and transforming songs
being reduced to just another rock album. In particular he says that Porter
lowered the pitch of “Reel Around The Fountain” to such a level that it bled
all the enticement and otherness out of the song.

When
compared with the astonishing version of the same song that the band had
recorded on a John Peel session in 1983, and as subsequently included on Hatful Of Hollow, this criticism cannot
be dismissed out of hand. As performed – a song which sounded about as “non-rock”
as anybody had done since Joy Division – its transformative but earthbound
ethereality had the potential to alter the way rock music was conceived,
performed and listened to like no other rock group between Joy Division and
Nirvana. It took pride in ignoring the base appeals to the monetarist, priapic
purse of most of its 1983 pop contemporaries; it suggested that somehow, in
some way, “we” could be above all that. Nobody else, with the arguable exception
of the R.E.M. of Murmur, was
producing music of this kind at the time.

Listening
to daytime radio in the early eighties, however, you could have been forgiven
for not even knowing that The Smiths existed, except as one of several running
jokes in Steve Wright’s Radio 1 afternoon show. Unlike the Beatles – but like
the Pistols – radio determinedly ignored them, viewing them as a transient
embarrassment easily swept under a dubious carpet. In their lifetime, the
highest singles chart position they achieved – twice – was #10. Some of this
may be ascribable to Rough Trade’s clearly inadequate marketing and distribution
resources, as well as what Morrissey claims was a fundamental misunderstanding
of their music by Rough Trade head Geoff Travis; he says that Travis hated “How
Soon Is Now?” on first listen and hence buried it on a 12-inch B-side.

But
in Johnny Rogan’s Morrissey And Marr: The
Severed Alliance, Porter claims that the band themselves lacked a certain
spark when it came to re-recording their debut album. Re-record? They had
already cut fourteen songs with Troy Tate producing, but Travis was disgruntled
by the result and passed the tapes to John Porter to see whether he could
rescue them. Porter decided that he could not – he felt that the music was “out
of tune and out of time,” although some could well have viewed that remark as a
value judgement in an age when everything had to be mathematically,
pedantically correct, every note and beat methodically hammered into its “right”
place.

However,
Porter offered to recut the entire record, and Morrissey was initially in
agreement; Johnny Marr was less enthused by the prospect but was eventually won
round. Listening to The Smiths now,
it is difficult to assess whether its lack of power and grace is more due to
Porter’s toning down of the group’s sound and playing, or, as Porter claims,
the performance of a band whose hearts really weren’t in it. In Autobiography Morrissey rails against
the lowering of the pitch of “Fountain” and the addition of Paul Carrack’s
keyboards, which indeed help reduce what should have been one of the most
striking introductory tracks on any rock album to the level of a late seventies
Van Morrison record, proficient but (largely) unexciting.

Porter,
though, says that it was impossible to get the band to play above this lowered
pitch, and that the final run-through sounded so plodding and interest-free
that he had no choice but to call in Carrack to fill in some embarrassing
spaces. Whatever did happen, the result is an underwhelming travesty, and the
rest of the record mostly remains earthbound; songs like “You’ve Got Everything
Now” and “Still Ill” are pale Xeroxes of what those of us who saw The Smiths on
stage at the time knew they were capable of producing, as radically as their
lyrics go against the grain of all other pop and rock of the period, including
Frankie (sex is palpably an embarrassment for Morrissey throughout the record).
The remixed and slightly extended “Hand In Glove” also lacks the spirit of the
original single, turning hope into a grind. Only on the closing “Suffer Little
Children” do they finally, albeit slowly, achieve lift-off and show us just how
radical the rest of the record might otherwise have been. The album attracted
rave reviews at the time which I think were down to wishful thinking.

Morrissey
didn’t like the recorded version of “What Difference Does It Make?” at all;
Mike Joyce’s drums sounded afraid to play, the attack sanded down to a
mid-ground, nondescript shrug. He also couldn’t equate Rough Trade’s claims
that the single had sold 250,000 copies with the record’s failure to climb
beyond #12. Yet it was a more straightforward introduction to The Smiths than
even “This Charming Man” had been; the relatively uncomplicated rock backing
track, possibly influenced by the B-52s’ “Private Idaho,” was well received.

Actually
“What Difference” is a lot better than Morrissey makes out. In a Now setting it is more the eruption of a
Catherine wheel than the exploding rocket of “Relax,” but its approach is
sufficiently out of kilter with the songs which surround it to make the
listener sit up and pay attention. Marr, Rourke and Joyce sound as though they
are thoroughly enjoying themselves – they more or less set the template here
for Suede, with their glam-rock residue - and Morrissey too enjoys playing sly
games on the listener (“I stole and I lied, and why? Because you asked me to!” and, later, set against a
soundtrack of screaming girls “No more apologies!”) as well as offering a blunt
frankness which reacted as violently against its surroundings as anything since
punk – “And I’m feeling very sick and ill today” was about as radical a
statement a singer could make in the keep fit and keep up at all costs
anti-culture prevalent in the early eighties. After that, Morrissey soars into
a joyous, or lamenting, falsetto (“Oh, my sacred one!”) as the band step up the
intensity and Joyce leans on his cowbell. A pop record – more so than a rock
record – such as used to be made, and played, except now as many people as
possible were pretending not to listen. “What Is Love?” “What Difference Does
It Make?” The sequencing must have
been deliberate.

Young
Businessmen Of The Year

It
did seem, however, that for every Smiths or Frankie, there were five or six
bands who simply didn’t get it. Fiction Factory were from Perth, and at the
time one of them, drummer Mike Ogletree, had been in Simple Minds (he pops up
on New Gold Dream). They had once
been a ska band called The Rude Boys, but CBS demanded that they scrub up, and
thus the entirely unexciting and uninvolving “(Feels Like) Heaven” – actually their
second single, after their debut, “The Ghost Of Love” got nowhere. Over-glossy
to migraine-inducing levels, singer, co-writer and co-producer Kevin Patterson
applies his sombre, rather showband-y baritone voice to a song which really
doesn’t feel like Tayport, let alone heaven, but more like a delayed, polished
up Marmalade B-side. I wish that Endgames’ “Waiting For Another Chance,” a
substantial Scottish hit single in 1983 which shows how well this sort of thing
can work if approached properly – and involving another Simple Minds alumnus,
bassist Brian McGee - had been a national hit and appeared on this record
instead.

Whereas
Re-Flex simply sound overblown. Since half of Level 42 and Thomas Dolby had
been involved with the group in its earlier stages, they cannot be readily
dismissed, but “The Politics Of Dancing” is a most unsatisfactory and confusing
confabulation of pop and politics which betrays an essential misunderstanding
of the intentions of New Pop; despite singer John Baxter’s sub-Bowie cries of “Get
this message under-STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!!,” it’s questionable whether anybody did,
or whether indeed there was a message in the first place. Later in 1984,
Re-Flex recorded a more overtly political album entitled Humanication, one of whose songs, “How Much Longer” included Sting,
no less, on backing vocals. But EMI America pulled the plug on the record,
claiming it was “too political.” It would be left to Australia – and in
particular Midnight Oil, with their album Blue
Sky Mining – to pull off this particular fusion.

There Isn’t Any
Rap Attack

As
with Now 1, Michael Jackson is the
elephant (man) in pop’s sitting room, but if we can’t hear from Jackson
himself, how about a song which had originally been written for him? Dolby
composed “Hyperactive!” with Jackson in mind to the point of sending him a demo
tape. He never heard back so decided to record it himself, but knowing the song’s
background should in itself be enough to distract people from the highly
misleading mad scientist persona with which Dolby had been labelled in Britain,
and which perhaps prevented him from becoming a bigger star in his own right;
everybody in the UK knew who Dr Magnus Pyke was, and so yawned when “She
Blinded Me With Science” came out, whereas Americans, who hadn’t the faintest
idea who Dr Pyke was, took both song and video to their hearts; their number
included Michael Jackson, who became a fan and eventually friend of Dolby.

As
a record, “Hyperactive!” bursts with colour, invention and humour. Its progress
is never predictable, and yet there is no attempt to be provocative for
provocation’s own sake; every Fairlight brass blast, rhythmic ambiguity (punk
rock drumming over a half-speed rap rhythm), trombone statement (Peter Thoms,
formerly of Landscape) and change of vocal emphasis – the deep-voiced
psychiatrist is Robyn Hitchcock – is entirely logical. But knowing that it was
written for Jackson to sing brings a new and disturbing dimension to the song,
which is about somebody who has essentially and gradually been driven insane by
life. “I can reach into your homes/Like an itch in your headphones”; here the
aim seems to be Jackson confronting his own listeners. “I’m the shape in your
back room/I’m the breather on the ‘phone” looks forward to the increasing
paranoia that we witness in Jackson’s own music from Bad onwards. Eventually, Dolby gives up the ghost and leaves the
rest of the song to an anxious female singer – apparently one Louise Ulfstedt –
who sounds (and I think deliberately so) a ghost for Jackson: “Hyperactive when
I’m small! Hyperactive now I’ve grown! Hyperactive ‘til I’m dead and gone!”
With this knowledge, the record actually becomes rather frightening. Dolby’s
second album, The Flat Earth, from
whence “Hyperactive!” is taken, is full of such uncertain invention; his
slow-burning six-minute-plus deconstruction of Dan Hicks’ “I Scare Myself”
(although Dolby probably had Barry Reynolds’ 1982 cover in mind) is worth the
price of the album alone.

And If I Wish To
Stop It All

Something
about “Wishful Thinking” bothers me. Disturbs me, even. So peaceful and
pastoral is the music, and yet so placidly unsettling. The distance lent in the
triangle of string synthesiser, delicate drums and oboe reminds me strongly of
something else that, in 1984, is yet to come; but what? Air (the French
electronic duo, not the New York free jazz trio) might be nearest but that
doesn’t quite fit either.

The
song was the only UK top ten hit for China Crisis, who otherwise seemed to
wander in and out of public attention rather randomly throughout the eighties.
Psychic TV’s “Just Dreaming”? Again, we’re almost there but not really. The
song is sung in a rather guileless Kirkby hiccup (Eddie Lundon taking a rare
lead vocal) against a background more unnerving than wistful. There’s a brief nod
to Elton John (“I sat on the roof”) and a haiku kind of lyric which says almost
nothing but suggests that you might not wish to listen to anything further. “And
if I wish to stop it all…/It’s just wishful thinking.” The stakes are perhaps
higher than the manically speedy “Hyperactive!” and knowing that, fifteen years
later, Kevin Wilkinson, the drummer on this record, did indeed end it all, only
serves to intensify the disturbance underlying the too-smooth surface
peacefulness.

Sarah
Records?

The Old Rock Has
Some Answers

Side
four of Now II appears to be devoted
to the big names, a bill-topping walk-down, as if the whole story, such as it
is, is approaching boiling (over?) point, a climactic summation. This includes songs
by David Bowie (who at this time definitely did not know what love was),
Culture Club and Duran Duran which have already been written about here. Two
strands are therefore left to address:

Rock, Rock,
Roll, Plymouth Rock, Roll Over

The
segue linking “Undercover Of The Night,” “Wonderland” and “Run Runaway” is
inspired. “Undercover” saw the Stones, in hibernation and on tour since Emotional Rescue (Tattoo You mainly comprising revised outtakes from seventies
sessions), suddenly wake up. Jagger reads Burroughs’ Cities Of The Red Night, hears “This Is Radio Clash,” watches the
news and decides to stand up and say something about Central America. Keith and
Ronnie keep their heads down and concentrate. Wyman and Watts link together
seamlessly (although some say it was Sly and Robbie, or maybe both rhythm
sections playing together; certainly multiple other auxiliary percussionists
were present). Words and sounds veer in and out of crazy focus like John Robie
hijacking Super Ape. Julian Cope
reckoned they’d been listening to The Pop Group. Arthur Baker wasn’t involved
in the production (Chris Kimsey did that) but his remix of “Too Much Blood”
from the Undercover album was one of
the last vital and perhaps one of the bloodiest things to come out under the
Stones’ name.

Like
“Speed Your Love To Me” – also produced by Steve Lillywhite – “Wonderland” is
an attempt to capture, and perhaps enlarge, the fire at the heart of Scottish
anxiety. Big Country are forthcoming in this tale with an album of their own,
but they were always a far more direct proposition than the Minds; “Wonderland”
was a stand-alone single to fill the gap between their first and second albums,
and at that point their biggest hit, and although its dynamics are as powerful
as anything on Sparkle In The Rain,
its metaphors are much more grounded; “If you could feel/How I must feel/The
winds of quiet change,” “The fifty years of sweat and tears/That never left a
trace,” “You still remember other days/When every head was high/I watched that
pride be torn apart” – this is the language of a Dick Gaughan, the sentiments
very clear; it is a song about the reclamation of a wrecked native land, of a
spirit that is unavoidably working-class; “I am an honest man,” sings Stuart
Adamson, as always sounding like a Fife Gordon Lightfoot. “I am a working man.”
But despite the ruination, the auld optimism holds firm and perhaps becomes
stronger: “With innocence within ourselves/We sing the same old song” – and what
is palpable is the stern, unflinching conviction of the group’s performance,
Tony Butler’s bass and Mark Brzezicki’s drums nearly running off the map
altogether towards song’s end, the firm belief that “we” can take this Scotland
and make it work and live again. So in that sense “Wonderland” is not so much a
rock song, more a folk prophecy.

“See
the chameleon, lying there in the sun” – it might have been a commentary on Boy
George. But Slade had come back, not entirely unexpectedly – it had been on the
cards since 1980 – and nearly managed a second Christmas number one, ten years
after their first one, with a similar message for a troubled country to pull
together and not walk alone. “My Oh My” was the song in question (with its
subtle nod to “Vienna”), but the follow-up “Run Runaway” was their only
significant American hit single, partly due to blanket coverage of its video on
MTV, but also to a revival of interest in Slade following Quiet Riot’s hit
cover of “Cum On Feel The Noize.” It was one of the group’s last great
rave-ups, with vintage yelling, boot-stomping, a rhythm owing something to “You
Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” Big Country-style guitar riffs, a half-tempo Status
Quo tribute in its centre, bagpipes and even, in the middle distance, Jim Lea’s
frenetic violin which had not been as prominent since “Coz I Luv You.” It was
as if Slade were offering up an anthology of what they did best; one last reel,
one final jig, before sobering up. It was nice to see them back in a pop
environment which missed them like a left shoulder.

And In The End…

It
is easy to forget, or not to know, how important it still was in 1984 for a
compilation album of this type to end with the words of a Beatle. The first
number one of its year, its opening "one and one" of "I light a
candle to our love/In love our problems disappear," with its sentimental
WWI pub piano (and apposite accompanying video), clearly won over the New Year
vote, but despite being essentially another in the long series of McCartney's
Well-Meaning-But-Trite State Of The World addresses "Pipes Of Peace"
does serve as a useful bookend for this pop year of 1984 - yes, Reader, witness
the attendant irony - which proved to be the most extreme test of how far and
how deeply pop and politics could mix, as well as demonstrating how far pop in
itself was allowed to go, and the barriers which routinely slammed down
whenever it strived to go beyond itself.

"Pipes
Of Peace" is therefore a quiet prelude which runs through many of the
post-Beatles Macca trademarks - a basic, loping light reggae beat (the song
seems to be a partial rewrite of "C Moon") which diverts into a
mock-martial rhythm (complete with the obligatory titular pipes) derived from
"Let 'Em In" and flies superficially over The World - children's
choir, tablas, Fairlights - as McCartney earnestly croons his slightly bizarre
platitudes - "Help them to learn songs of joy instead of Burn Baby
Burn" (possibly a reference to the 1974 Hudson-Ford hit, or perhaps he
just remembered Lennon's equivocation on "Revolution") and a moment
of classic McCartney guilelessness with the priceless couplet "Or will
someone save this planet we're playing on?/Is it the only one?" which I
imagine Lennon would promptly have laughed out of Abbey Road; then again, he
was no longer around to do so.

Oddly
enough, McCartney’s remark about “little children being born to the world” did
carry an impact of which at the time he could not help but be unaware; “Pipes
Of Peace” was number one on the day Calvin Harris was born. But even the song’s
essential naïvety is undercut by a deadly seriousness; remember that on Now II it is a bookend, reminding us
that all of this might be about to die, and do you, the listeners, really,
truly want that to happen? And it, and
the record, end with the unexpected but completely logical return of the
closing orchestral (though by 1983 probably synthesised) figures of “The End,”
almost the Beatles’ last word, before finishing on what Ian MacDonald might
have called a sadly smiling E major – the final chord of “A Day In The Life,” a
stairway to heaven. Given that fifteen months earlier, Abram had shown us a
pathway which seemingly ended in hell (“Starmaker”), this has to be considered progress,
and certainly, although not qualitatively consistent, Now II is far more emotionally rewarding a listening experience
than its predecessor. But the next volume would document some of the quantum
leap which this volume had been quietly anticipating.

(N.B.: The above comments on "Relax" are a slightly remixed version of the comment which I posted on Popular some time back; my essential feelings about the record haven't really changed since then.)

10 comments:

re. "99 Red Balloons": for me, Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" (the precursor of "99 Luftballons" as German number one in early 1983 in its German-language version, a US Top 20 hit in its English version, but not even a Top 40 single in the UK, and the 'Cheggers Plays Pop' where he performed it was wiped) conveys much more of the paranoia of the reheated Cold War - the sense of being on its absolute faultline, like a humanly-created volcano in a forcibly divided country - than "99 Red Balloons" does. It feels much more like looking out over the barbed wire into the East and wondering whether you'll be the first to go, whereas Nena's hit - especially in its English version - doesn't quite do it. DOF's "Codo" - another 1983 German chart-topper which could never have charted in any English-speaking country - feels that way even more so. I can remember someone once saying they felt "99 Luftballons" was really a Schlager song in disguise, and that's closer to the truth than I'd like it to be.

re. London pirate radio: it was indeed getting huge audiences at this point and seriously challenging Capital Radio, which had (possibly to fit better with much of provincial ILR; possibly to appease the IBA during a franchise renewal) started skewing older and more middle-of-the-road just as the new wave of unlicensed stations took off - in March 1983, both of Greg Edwards' weekend soul shows were *shortened*, as if the Light Programme had reduced its pop output in 1966. The law was enforced more firmly later in 1984 (though this didn't last long; the Thatcher government cancelling a "community radio" experiment in 1986 before it had even begun strengthened the frustration and determination of these stations, which would have to wait until Kiss was licensed in 1990 to go legit) and in the autumn of 1984 Capital had a major relaunch - Michael Aspel left, and its weekend coverage of the music played on pirate stations was considerably beefed up (especially in the form of Mike Allen's electro / hip-hop show). But "they wouldn't understand it in Devon" - basically the same "unsophisticated provincials" horror stories of BBC assumptions retold by the likes of Milligan and the Pythons - so it took a decade, and a wider generational change, for Radio 1 to make comparable steps even to those.

But - as you say - Capital and other ILR stations did play "Relax", which was unequivocally number one on Alan Freeman's Pick of the Pops Take 2 (at this point using the NME chart).

I'm going to miss the Various Artists when they disappear at the end of the '80s.

Wishful Thinking is such an odd song, one that I don't think about for many years and then suddenly find myself stopped short by. I'd never consciously thought of your interpretation before, but it fits the unsettling mood of eliptical vulnerability.

One thing about it that fascinates me is how the cobweb-light lyrics tell an oblique story with three characters; the narrator, the person listening to him (It's time we should talk about it/ There's no secrets kept in here/ Forgive me for asking/ Now wipe away your tears) and a third, male, party (I saw the likeness in his smile/ And the way he stands/ Makes it all worthwhile)

Sometimes I think that its about an unrequited, unacted-upon, homosexual love. More often I tend to think that its sung from an unhappy husband to his wife, and the one who "makes it all worthwhile" is their son.

I always assumed it was Adele B taking over on "Hyperactive!" (it's what it says on the album sleeve) but apparently not. I haven't been able to find out anything else about the mysterious Ms Ulfstedt.

Regarding "Reel around the fountain" - the Peel version on "Hatful of hollow" is in a spritely key of B and is 5 mins 50 seconds, the Troy Tate version (issued as part of the "Complete" digital download) is in the key of A and is slower, with a time of 6 min 14 seconds and is a lot more sluggish than the John Porter version which is also in A. At the time, the tale was told that the key was dropped to make it easier for Carrack to add his keyboards. In retrospect that may not be true at all. Apologies if this is turning into Guitar Player magazine. An excellent read as ever, which really captures that era completely.

Bloody hell. Endgames. I loved them. They did 3 or 4 songs on The Tube early 84; I wore out my video recording. The first album they did is great, and the various extended versions of tracks are pretty fine too. Listening back I can hear the influence of Thriller on a lot of the sounds, especially the drums, but that's not a bad thing. They really should have been bigger.

China Crisis were very slippery, and citing Wishful Thinking as a precursor to both Sarah Records AND Air is astute. I could never really work out where they fitted, beyond the melancholic melodicism of other Merseysiders (Liverpool Express, OMD).

I'm wondering if they'll crop up on any future Nows; their later hits seemed very beige to me at the time, but I haven't heard them in decades.

Before Wishful Thinking, though, there were certainly some moments. A Golden Handshake For Every Daughter, the b-side of 1983's Tragedy & Mystery, was reminiscent of the Casuals' Jesamine in its lostness. It had an oboe line for a hook, while lines like "push me gently, ever so gently, the water's far too deep" anticipated Wishful Thinking's lyric about divorce (at least that's how I read it). Possibly too gentle to be an A-side, it worked as a summer '83 Liverpool soundtrack with Care's My Boyish Days. Both worked as requiems for New Pop and the early 80s Liverpool scene.

Elsewhere, Jean Walks In Fresh fields, the instrumental that closes the first China Crisis album from late '82, has minor chord keyboard washes worthy of Architecture & Morality.

And Marcello, this is a tremendous piece. I'm already looking forward to Now III.

So I've been absolutely taken by the question of the backing vocals on "Hyperactive!" for the past half hour or so and expected to broach the topic here - only to see that the discussion was already underway! But anyway, here's what insight I think I can offer based on my wanderings around Discogs, etc. (have patience, please):My initial googling turned up a mention of miss Louise Ulfstedt on the Wikipedia article of the song, but its mention of her has since been removed. The earlier version that mentioned her pointed here:http://musicbrainz.org/recording/7204c339-a622-4ee1-88d6-edd92498ce2d...where she's in the category of "additional vocals", as distinct from "background vocals" where Adele Bertei shows up (alongside Kevin Armstrong, which is my primary source of confusion - but we'll get to that in a bit).Over on Discogs miss Ulfstedt seems to be credited in the category of "The Analyst" whenever she shows up on the album's credits, which seems to point to her having a role in the song specific to the psychiatrist bits. Whereas Adele Bertei always gets credited for "Backing Vocals". Listening to Adele's (Dolby-produced) track "Build Me A Bridge" gives me ample confidence in her ability to pull off that manic pixie range from the end of "Hyperactive!" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9F-LrAsyhgU), as do both the other songs on Dolby's album that she's credited with providing vocals for. Which leaves the question of what Louise did. The only song I found of hers in my search was a vocal feature on a 1999 chillout-house track on F Communications (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOlYFPBgFh8), which, while quite lovely, doesn't give much insight into what her voice sounds like. Based on it though I think it seems possible that she's the one doing the exasperated/passionate moans during the psychiatrist bit - which makes her as valuable a contributor to the song as any other, if you ask me.

(And a different debate: I'm pretty sure Robyn Hitchcock does the vocal interlude on "White City", as he's credited there, while Kevin Armstrong is the psychiatrist on "Hyperactive!":http://www.discogs.com/artist/130657-Kevin-Armstrong)

p.s. If this all seems a bit pedantic, just know that I'm doing this because I found the song through this post and am absolutely taken with it, the backing vocals in particular. I'd just like to know who to give my thanks to (Marcello aside)!

Last year Robin Carmody wrote "Peter Schilling's "Major Tom" (the precursor of "99 Luftballons" as German number one in early 1983 in its German-language version, a US Top 20 hit in its English version, but not even a Top 40 single in the UK, and the 'Cheggers Plays Pop' where he performed it was wiped) conveys much more of the paranoia of the reheated Cold War"

Happily, since then an off-air has turned up of that Peter Schilling Cheggers edition (22 May 1984) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f77BJ8h75W8